areas. Both the scale of present interest and their
widespread acceptance among the aid community
suggest that their application will continue to grow.
But the path ahead to ensure broad adoption and
mainstreaming of PCR is still not straightforward,
hence the need for further tools and guidance.
PCR promotes the idea that housing is a
process, not merely the provision of a product. The
people living in these houses and their surrounding
community should rightly be at the centre of
this process. This means that households make
their own choices including the project design,
procurement of materials, construction preferences
and use of specific technologies. They can opt for
grants and rebuild themselves, or outsource part
of the construction to external service providers,
artisans and contractors. The may chose how much
they wish to spend on the construction, care and
maintenance of houses, in order to save some
money to start livelihoods activities.
The case studies below exemplify how people-
oriented processes that served to design spatial
forms, enable livelihoods and build social
infrastructures; taken together, they make people
less vulnerable to future risks. The programmes
described have had profound and durable effects
on the local communities, which increased their
sense of ownership and self-reliance. The variety
of designs of houses and settlements demonstrate
the vitality of the building culture and local
construction practices that can be produced when
residents are encouraged to take the lead in the
reconstruction process.
The challenges and benefits of PCR
It is often believed that any participatory housing
programme is slower, more arduous and time-
consuming compared with conventional market-
driven/ top-down approaches. A misleading
assumption is that PCR lacks quality control
mechanisms, leads to sub-standard buildings or
opens the door to corruption.
However, there is no escape in the fact that
long-term recovery and real bottom-up development
requires long term commitment. In order to
ensure that more marginal groups are involved and
empowered, significant efforts must be invested
to consult widely. In this sense, there are no
shortcuts to getting this process right. Designing a
building is much easier than designing a process of
social engagement – by which recovery strategies,
ideas, practices and core values are shared and
disseminated in collaboration with the greater civil
society.
Despite this, examples illustrate that well
planned and implemented projects can produce
quite the opposite: house-owners will be faster at
purchasing materials, at contracting out part of
People building improved adobe walls, following an earthquake
in Pisco, Peru.
the work if they need to, at assisting on technical
supervision and quality control. All this generally
ensures that the level of satisfaction with the end
product is higher.
Guidance for PCR
We have chosen not to produce a manual on PCR,
but a toolkit, for two reasons:
• Three guidance documents, listed below, are
in an advanced stage of production, and aim
to reach those involved in reconstruction, at
decision making as well as field levels. They
contain a lot of information, on which PCR can
draw. Whilst a manual on PCR would add other
information, that in itself is not sufficient reason
to produce one at this stage.
• Tools can be more flexible. They will be designed
to add value to the existing information, e.g.
to address gaps in the handbooks, or explain
aspects that make PCR different from other
approaches being discussed in the humanitarian
community. Above all, they can easily be
updated as and when new experience becomes
available.
What are the handbooks, and how does this Toolkit
relate to them?
In this reconstruction project in Colombia, money was made
available to rebuild livelihood infrastructure (in this case for
coffee processing, the elevated part) as well as housing
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